An acclaimed U.S. professor of history finds his roots in a personal journey through Israel--and through assimilated America, academia, baseball, and family--headlong into deep tensions about country, culture, identity and religion. Worried about the commitment of Jews to their heritage, Auerbach (renowned author of Unequal Justice) shares his story and musings with insight, irony, and intensity.

A renowned historian examines the special contributions of rabbis and lawyers to American Jewish acculturation. Based on extensive research in U.S. and Israeli archives, his analysis of how lawyers displaced rabbis as community leaders in the 20th century illuminates a decisive moment in U.S Jewish history, and shows how law became deified, to the point of slighting the Holocaust and Zionism.

AGAINST THE GRAIN is a collection of challenging and insightful essays from a reflective American historian. Jerold Auerbach, Professor Emeritus at Wellesley (where he taught 40 years), writes in the Foreword how his academic career and his time in Israel "each in its own distinctive way converged to liberate me from my past as a non-Jewish Jew." The historian reflects back on this dilemma.